


A Sign of Rigor

by little_brisk



Category: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/F, Kinktober 2020, Praise Kink, Wall Sex, dance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:28:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27281200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_brisk/pseuds/little_brisk
Summary: A ballet lesson and two takes on the erotics of praise.
Relationships: Beverly Crusher/Laris (Star Trek)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23





	A Sign of Rigor

**Author's Note:**

> This takes up some premises from [The Smaller Worlds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378803/chapters/56019262), where Laris and Beverly share some fraught intimacy through dance, Laris's workspace-slash-dance-studio is her sanctum, and there's a glancing suggestion that Laris is fascinated by the antiquated tradition of ballet, but this story stands on its own.
> 
> Note that this gets into some tricky territory to do with body scrutiny in the context of dance instruction; the point is to work through it safely and pleasurably, but it could certainly be triggering.

In the light of late August, rich and yellow on the sprung oak floor, with the lavender-scented breeze coming in at the window soft and cool, Laris struggled and sweated her way through the final movements of the exercises she’d been studying all summer. She had studied alone; she had an audience now. She tried not to think about it. Her back to the mirror, her eyes fixed on the blank wall, she screwed all her willpower and the strain of every muscle to the sole aim of sticking the final pose.

‘That’s good!’ exclaimed Beverly, a shock of royal blue and white at the edge of her awareness, a presence to which she was not yet wholly reaccustomed. ‘You have it!’

Laris clenched her jaw and schooled her breath. She did not have it. Her extension was failing; her right quadriceps was so overtaxed that she wobbled like a gyroscope with the effort to keep her center of gravity over the narrow point of her crushed toes in their ridiculous shoe; her whole self was one frustrated clench, and she knew that this was it, the pitiful best that she would manage.

‘Really good,’ Beverly repeated, as though she meant it, and that was the last straw.

‘It fucking isn’t!’ Laris spat, and her pose collapsed with a graceless thud of both feet on the resonant floor. She took the water bottle Beverly offered and drank resentfully. ‘Don’t patronise me,’ she panted, pointing an accusatory finger at her, and Beverly held up her hands in protest.

‘I wouldn’t dare,’ Beverly said, sounding more rebuked than Laris had intended.

‘I know,’ Laris conceded, collapsing onto the workbench that stood opposite the barre she had installed on the long wall of her studio.

Beverly gave her a moment to sulk, then crossed the room to kneel at her feet, laying her hands on her knees and looking up at her with bright, kind eyes. ‘I really thought—’

‘Please don’t,’ Laris interrupted, not gently enough. ‘Please,’ she said more softly. ‘Don’t.’

She’d worked herself harder than she’d ever admit to Beverly in the months of her absence, trying to master these postures, these contortions, but she’d perfected none of them and the ones she could approximate she could never find reliably, or hold for long. Intellectually, she understood that it was not reasonable to expect herself to acquire a lifetime’s worth of expertise and muscle memory in a single summer; she knew that Beverly was not the judge inside her mind whose evaluating eye she’d never satisfy; she knew the voice that had taught her never to take too much satisfaction in herself or enjoy unearned accomplishment belonged to someone long since dead. It did not matter.

And it did not matter how Beverly adored her body; it did not matter that the dancers in the training holos Beverly had left with her were of every shape conceivable, nor that all of them seemed magnificent to her as she watched and studied and sought to imitate them. She felt the sag of her own belly as a reproach against her discipline, the loose skin on her upper arms was an ever-present accusation of having dared to age, and every step, every pose, every move of every muscle was accompanied by that long-dead voice and by the deep, ingrained, inextricable imperative in which it had trained her so uncompromisingly to turn her body and its attractions always to advantage.

Never mind that the woman she danced for now was one who had on more than one occasion wept to see her, literally just to look at her, who had lain her head on that soft sag of a belly as though it were a sacred thing, who had kissed every inch of her with delirious enchantment and reeled off praises richer than hymns, who coveted photographs of her and told her daily all that she found magnificent about her, one whose voice and hands correcting the postures of her body were only ever warmly welcome.

Well, Laris thought, catching her breath and looking at that woman now, kneeling at her feet and gazing at her with a determined kind of admiration, perhaps it did matter. Perhaps it was making a difference of some kind, after all.

‘In any case,’ Beverly was saying as she lifted Laris’s left foot into her lap and began with very gentle, very precise hands to untie the lace of her shoe, ‘that’s enough punishment for your feet for one day.’ Having removed first one shoe, then the other, Beverly reached for the medkit on the bench next to her, her body warm against Laris’s shins. Laris half reached to run her hand through the soft white falls of her hair, but she straightened too soon, and Laris, feeling foolish, let her hand fall into her lap. Beverly just gave her a wry grin, smoothing one hand over the arches of her feet and brandishing with the other the little device she ominously called The Bone Stitcher.

‘Would you like me to find faults where there aren’t any?’ she asked pointedly, too knowingly, running the beam of the device over Laris’s toes, her metatarsals. Laris knew it was illusory, but she couldn’t help imagining that she could feel the microfractures stitching themselves up under Beverly’s care, feel her very bones recovering in her hands. ‘Would you like me to scold you,’ Beverly went on, ‘for being unable to do effortlessly things that the most experienced dancers sometimes struggle with?’ There was no way Laris could answer that that would not sound appallingly petulant, and Beverly knew it. ‘See, this is why I hate ballet,’ she concluded bluntly.

‘You love ballet!’ Laris objected, incredulous. Beverly shook her head.

‘No. I hate it. I _do_ it for the discipline, but I hate it. There,’ she said, setting aside the device, laying her hands over Laris’s feet in a protective gesture that made Laris smile despite herself. ‘I hate its perfectionism and its obsession with uniformity and its unaccommodating ideas about what bodies should be, and I hate that it’s hardly changed at all for five hundred years. But that’s exactly what draws you to it, isn’t it?’

‘The discipline, yes,’ Laris admitted, ignoring Beverly’s wry smirk. ‘It’s rigorous. Demanding. I like that.’ And she liked its intransigence too, if she was being honest. Beverly would call her conservative if she said it aloud, but things that did not change had a way of reassuring her.

‘Yeah, because there are things wrong with you,’ Beverly muttered, but it was said so lovingly and in such good humor that Laris couldn’t object. Not to mention that she was right. ‘How are your knees?’ she asked, tapping them for emphasis.

‘Grand,’ Laris said automatically, and it was mostly true. There was no way Beverly believed her, but she let it go for now, which must mean she thought Laris was feeling more fragile than she was. Or maybe she was right about that, too. ‘I’m sorry,’ Laris offered, for lack of anything better.

Beverly rose up on her knees and palmed her cheek. ‘For what?’ she said, and then, before Laris could answer, ‘Come here.’ And pulled her close and kissed her, soft and warm, inviting, sweet.

‘I didn’t deserve that,’ Laris said warily, pulling back.

Beverly rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Then something mischievous came into her voice. ‘But if you want to earn your kisses, fine. Let’s finish your workout.’

‘It’s not finished?’ Laris said with a vague sense of dread, but the look in Beverly’s eyes would have overcome any degree of exhaustion.

‘No,’ Beverly said, drawing her to her feet, positioning her in the center of the room, where the high sun poured its light down through the skylights and warmed her skin. ‘You want demanding? All right, then back to basics.’

The sudden tone of authority in her voice snapped Laris to almost involuntary attention, and she flushed top to toe with too-keen awareness of just how easy she was, how obvious. If Beverly noticed, which she surely did, she ignored it.

‘Show me first position,’ she ordered. Laris complied without thinking, and in thoughtless compliance found a rush of relief. ‘Drop your shoulders,’ Beverly corrected. Laris complied. ‘Laris. Shoulders.’ Laris couldn’t help her sharp inhale, nor the way the thin forbearance in the command made her every muscle clench. But she took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders obediently into balance. It took three more tries before Beverly moved on. Circling round behind her, examining her, Beverly tapped her left heel with her toe. Laris focused, found the fault in the angle of her turnout, and corrected it. She knew she had it before she heard Beverly’s perfunctory grunt of approval, and the feeling of _right_ that washed over her took with it all the anxiety of failure she’d been steeped in.

‘Now hold that,’ Beverly instructed her, completing her circle and coming to stand in front of her again, scrutinizing her, arms folded under her breasts, the fingertips of one hand tapping in thoughtful sequences against the thumb. At last, she gave a permissive nod. Laris let out a shuddering exhale.

‘Second,’ Beverly clipped. Laris complied.

By third position, Laris was sweating, feeling Beverly’s exactitude like a hot spike through the center of her, all the sharper for the stark contrast with Beverly’s natural teacherly demeanor. _You asked for this_ , Beverly’s raptorish gaze seemed to say, and Laris ached to deserve her deliberate, watchful intensity. As she thrust her foot forward into fourth, as her arms swept almost without thought, like the arms of a counterweighted automaton, through the arc of the transition, as she adjusted according to Beverly’s close examination and curt correctives, she felt a need growing in the core of her that made her heart race and her breath come short. Trembling to hold fifth position, she was so aroused that she could smell it, and she was sure Beverly must, too. Her skin burned with effort and awareness of herself, almost with fear, as Beverly stepped close to her, close enough to kiss, and swept her hands gratuitously along her arms to make very fine adjustments in the positions of her wrists, her fingers. Laris clenched her jaw, and schooled her breath, and burned with wanting her.

‘There,’ Beverly breathed at last, so close her jumper brushed against Laris’s chest. ‘Very, very good,’ she said, her voice deep and warm with incontestable sincerity, and pulled Laris out of her tensely held pose into a kiss and an embrace so full of admiration and desire that if she had not been held quite tightly, Laris would for certain have sunk directly to the ground.

She had had lovers as challenging, as thrillingly exacting as Beverly, and a few as safe and doting, careful, kind, and even one or two on either side who had seen right through her, understood her with the same searing, total comprehension, but never all those things together in a single person; no single person had ever made her feel what she felt standing there, or rather, suspended there in Beverly’s arms, not trusting the strength of her own legs but wholly, gladly given over to the secure unflinching hold of the woman who had made such a precise agony and such a fulsome reward of the simplest rote exercise, who had gone to such effort simply to give her the pleasure and release of it.

There was no halfway, there never was, in her recovery from the experience. As Beverly eased back, as she stood once more firmly planted on her feet and raised her eyes to Beverly’s, want rose in her like a growl in the throat.

‘Beverly,’ she rasped, and finding her throat too dry to speak, snatched up the water bottle and drank greedily, not caring how absurd she looked or that Beverly was openly laughing at her. She laughed too, feral, aflame, and threw the bottle aside and shoved Beverly up against the wall. ‘Beverly,’ she tried again, clear and true this time, and kissed her, held her by the throat and pressed the heel of her hand hard against her hip and kissed her fiercely, and the laugh went right out of her as she whimpered pitifully and sank into Laris’s unyielding hold.

‘Laris,’ she sighed, permission and an invitation together and heavy with frank, undisguised desire.

‘Yes,’ Laris answered, replacing her hand with her mouth at her throat, ‘yes.’ She sucked a rough red mark onto the tender skin that stretched across Beverly’s clavicle, then pulled back to get a look at her, flushed and disheveled and more beautiful than Laris knew how to say. She splayed her fingers across Beverly’s mouth and smiled to herself, watching her eyelids flutter closed, delighting in her needy gasp. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘it’s time for you to be good for me, now, yes?’

Beverly laughed like she couldn’t help herself, leaning back against the wall. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Anything, anything you want,’ she promised, with that wide wild grin of hers. Facetious, perhaps—she certainly knew exactly what Laris wanted, and knew, too, how much power that wanting held over her—but the way she offered herself so freely knocked Laris breathless. It always did.

‘Ah, go on,’ Laris said in a comically failed effort at casual and cool, as she slipped her fingers down under the waistband of Beverly’s leggings, and her knickers, too. ‘I think I just want to fuck you right here, really, is all.’ At that Beverly let out a mad, animal whine. Laris grinned against her mouth and scraped her nails through her thicket of coarse hair, gripped and tugged to make Beverly cry out. ‘I want to feel you come in my hand,’ she said, just for Beverly’s reaction. ‘Can you do that for me?’ And she got what she wanted: Beverly nodding frantically, clutching her with biting, begging kisses that she felt all the way down to her toes. ‘Good,’ she breathed, and slipped her fingers down across the slick and swollen heat of her. ‘Fuck, you’re wet,’ she blurted helplessly, circling her, testing, finding a rhythm, setting a pace.

‘You think?’ Beverly panted, moaning gratefully as she canted her hips into Laris’s hand. ‘You drive me—fuck, Laris, yes, yes, like that, yes—it drives me wild to—fuck!—to watch you, watch you move, like that, like, like you— _ohhhh_ , Laris, oh, fuck,’ and then she had no more words, just gasps of need and effort and the inexhaustibly attractive movement of her body.

‘Perfect,’ Laris breathed against her neck, ‘you are perfect,’ just to marvel at the way Beverly responded to such outrageous praise, glowing, unfurling almost, basking in it. And it wasn’t, actually, so outrageous. ‘You really are, d’you know, you really are just the most gorgeous thing.’ Beverly gasped, and flushed, and grinned a wide, self-satisfied grin, and arched into Laris’s touch, Laris’s voice, Laris’s praise, like it was easy for her, taking her due and still begging for more, and it was, it really was just about the most magnificent thing Laris had ever seen.

‘I’m—Laris,’ she gasped, anxious, urgent, ‘I’m so close—’

Laris laughed a wild, delirious laugh, nuzzling into her shoulder and gripping her tightly and moving through the searing burn in her arm, the ache of her wrist, to keep Beverly where she needed to be. ‘ _I know_ ,’ she said, because she did, and that too seemed to her extraordinary, miraculous, that she could just take her like this, fast and hard against the wall. ‘You’re exquisite like this,’ she panted, pulling back to hold Beverly’s gaze with her own, palming her cheek, thumbing her mouth, so that she whimpered in the tense, desperate way she did when she was on the point of orgasm. ‘Fuck,’ Laris laughed, overwhelmed with the splendor of her and with what it felt like to get to be the one who told her how exquisite she was, ‘fuck, you’re exquisite like this, I love you like this, you’re perfect, Beverly, perfect, now— _come for me_ ,’ she commanded with her hand as with her voice, held firm, and Beverly did. Perfect, miraculous, Beverly came for her, clenching hard against her fingers with a shout that became a laugh, her head knocking back against the wall with a thud that only made her laugh harder, a beautiful enraptured moan of a laugh as she tensed and jerked in Laris’s arms. Laris held her through it, kissed her, murmured nonsense to reward and soothe her, til the intensity of it ebbed away and she crumpled, sliding down the wall, pulling Laris with her into a panting, exhausted heap.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, drawing Laris’s sticky, sore hand to her lips. ‘That was…’ she trailed off, not bothering to try to finish.

‘Yes,’ Laris said, flexing her fingers against Beverly’s lips, pressing a kiss to her shoulder. ‘You…’ But she had no more wherewithal than Beverly to find whatever words might be sufficient. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes and sighed.

In a moment, she would ask Beverly to take her to bed; she would let Beverly undress her and lay her down and kiss her worshipfully everywhere, reeling off her praises. She would sink gladly into the safe dark place where she belonged to Beverly, and come apart under her mouth. In a moment, she would ask. For now she rested her head on Beverly’s shoulder, and pulled Beverly’s hand across to rest it on her belly, a perfect fit across the curve of her, and let herself dwell a while in the feeling of total confidence that she, and Beverly, and they two together, and all things everywhere, were as they ought to be.


End file.
